How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  “Do you not own a pressure washer?” Barrett asked.

  “I own ten of them.”

  “But your company didn’t clean the decks for a long-term client? And you didn’t hire Jeffrey Girard?”

  “This is bullshit,” Mark Millinock said. He was tapping the heavy bottle opener on the bar with a tense hand. “I want you to get the—”

  “You don’t deserve an answer,” Mathias told Barrett, interrupting Millinock, “but there’s a part of me that almost feels sorry for you. So I’ll give you an answer. The last one.” He leaned close to Barrett, eyes aflame. “Ian Kelly wrote that check. The kid made the hire, okay? I don’t know how he met a worthless shit-brain like Girard, but here’s what I do know—I had to fix the work for him. And, oh, Barrett? I didn’t bill anybody for that either. Why? Because my reputation is my livelihood.”

  He stood up, leaving the beer unfinished and the whiskey untouched. “I don’t know what empty places you’re trying to fill, staying stuck in the same rut of bullshit that Kimmy fed you, but keep spinning in it, man. It’ll take you down now, not me.”

  He turned to Mark Millinock and said, “Make sure he tips you well,” and then he walked out of the bar. Millinock was still drumming that ridiculous but dangerous bottle opener on the bar, and Ronnie Lord and one of the strangers were circling behind Barrett with pool cues in hand.

  Barrett drank his beer and waited, watching the dusty mirror behind the bar. He fixated on a place in the corner where his grandfather had once kept a family photograph tucked between the glass and the frame. The picture had been taken when Barrett was seven, the last time he’d ever been in Port Hope with his father, and the last time he’d been anywhere away from home with his mother. She’d been thirty-four years old then, the same age as he was now, healthy and beautiful, with eyes that seemed set in permanent laughter, and in the photograph she’d had the full confidence of youth.

  She was dead five months after the photo was taken.

  Barrett thought he could still make out the lines of the old masking tape that had held it to the glass. He was staring at them when the door opened again and Mathias stepped back inside. Barrett watched him in the mirror, not turning.

  “You blocked me in? What in the hell is the matter with you? What are you trying to do?”

  Barrett didn’t answer.

  “Move your car,” Mathias said, and the first glimpse of his temper showed, his self-control beginning to curl up at the edges from the heat beneath.

  “Just let me finish my beer,” Barrett said. He didn’t like how familiar it all felt, this room and his face in the mirror and his absurd words and actions, each one the choice of a fool spoiling for a fight. Most of all he didn’t like how much he was enjoying it. His blood was up, and it did not feel bad. Not even a little bit.

  Mathias Burke laughed with disbelief and shook his head. “You’re a stupid man,” he said. “You think you can push me until you find the right spot, don’t you? But you’re the one at risk. Keep pushing.”

  Barrett didn’t answer, just drank his beer.

  “Get up, asshole,” Mark Millinock said, starting to come around the bar, and Barrett pivoted to meet him with an odd sense of relief, as though this was what he’d always needed.

  Mathias Burke said, “Let him be, Mark,” but it wasn’t Mark Millinock who reached for Barrett first. Instead, Ronnie Lord grabbed a fistful of his shirt.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “You got no reason to be here anymore.”

  Barrett stood still for a moment, looking first at Ronnie’s hand bunched around his shirt and then into his face, this social disease putting his hands on him and telling him to get out.

  “Ronnie, damn it, back up,” Mathias snapped, and he stepped forward, but he was too late.

  Barrett’s first blow felt like something watched through a window or heard through a closed door. Anything but intimate. He drove his right fist into Ronnie Lord’s sternum, watched the man’s green eyes go wide and white with pain, and then slammed him against the bar. A glass fell and broke and then Mark Millinock was coming toward them as Barrett smashed his elbow into Ronnie’s throat, taking the man’s breath out high and low, then pushed him into Millinock.

  They fell into the bar together, Millinock cursing and Ronnie wheezing in strangled gasps as he fought for air, and Barrett lifted his fists and felt a smile rising to his lips as he saw Mark Millinock reach for the pool cue.

  Good. Have a weapon, have two, I don’t care, because I don’t mind getting hit today…

  Mathias Burke caught the pool cue before Mark brought it home across Barrett’s chest.

  “Nobody’s hitting him, damn it!”

  “What in the hell is the matter with you?” Mark roared at him. “The son of a bitch is in here busting up people in my bar, and I—”

  “Go back behind the bar and call the police.”

  Mark stared at him, dumbfounded. “Call the police? I’ll put his ass out into the parking lot, I don’t give a damn if he’s an FBI agent or the pope, it’s my bar and I want him gone!”

  “Let’s see you put me out, Mark,” Barrett said, still wanting the fight, the release of physical contact working on him like a drug. Then he looked down at Ronnie Lord, who was hunched over on the barroom floor, one hand on his gut and one at his throat, still fighting for breath, his face contorted in pain. The sight of him brought Barrett back into the moment, carried him through that sealed window and shut door and returned him to a shameful reality.

  What are you doing? What in the holy hell are you doing?

  “Call the police,” Mathias repeated, his voice low and calm. “He’s disturbing the peace in your business, don’t you think? That’s for the police to handle.”

  A stupid grin slid over Mark Millinock’s face. “Sure it is.”

  “Then call them.”

  Mark stepped back behind the bar and picked up the phone, and Mathias Burke looked at Barrett and spread his arms.

  “I guess you wanted it to go like this.”

  “I guess so,” Barrett said, and then he went outside to wait for the police.

  19

  The responding officer spoke to Mark Millinock and Ronnie Lord and made some references to rumors he’d heard about their drug habits, and then it was swiftly agreed that nobody wanted to press charges. The officer came back outside and looked at Barrett with a mix of confusion and contempt and told him to get the hell away from the bar before he embarrassed the badge.

  When Barrett left, there was a small crowd of onlookers in his rearview mirror and he saw clearly on their faces that they believed they were watching a fool, and he knew that they were not wrong. By now he felt ridiculous and ashamed and could not understand how he’d gotten so far along such a stupid path.

  He gets my blood up. That son of a bitch Mathias gets my blood up.

  The voice in his head was not his own. It was his grandfather’s, and he knew that. So why was it there? How had he allowed it in and then let it take control, like a tumor?

  You were wrong. Kimberly lied to you, and you were wrong, and you can’t admit that. So instead, you’re acting like a fool.

  He was only five minutes away from the bar when Liz called.

  “Please tell me it isn’t true,” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Home. Rob? Come here now, and don’t stop along the way.”

  He’d lost his ability to listen to his own good advice today, but he could still follow hers.

  She was waiting on the front steps, scratching the cat she’d named No Smarts. He was a stray she’d found along the road, and although she’d had him neutered, the vet had apparently forgotten to notify the cat of the procedure, because No Smarts remained prone to fights and feral behavior and held a deep distrust of anyone other than Liz. He flattened his ears when he saw Barrett, hissed, and retreated beneath the porch to watch from the shadows with flicking green eyes.

  “Sweet,” Barrett said.

>   “He knows trouble. You’ll be in the paper tomorrow.”

  “You wrote about that? With no charges, no arrest?”

  “I didn’t write about it. I’m not allowed to write about you.” She gave a humorless smile. “Ethical concerns. I disclosed my relationship with you to my editor.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s hardly a story I’d have enjoyed writing. What in the hell were you thinking, Rob?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. I was…I just wanted to see him. I wanted to see him and look in his face and…” He shook his head. “Know the truth.”

  “How’d that work out for you?”

  He sat beside her on the steps. She didn’t move toward him or look at him. He wanted her to put her hand on his leg in the way she often did, or lean her head against his shoulder. Instead, she ran her palms across her thighs as if smoothing wrinkles out of her jeans. Her jeans were covered with paint and dust and he knew she must have been working on her boat when she’d heard about his near arrest at the Harpoon.

  She still didn’t look at him when she said, “You were lied to. You believed it. That happens to all of us. Don’t self-sabotage like this because you’re embarrassed that it happened to you.”

  He didn’t answer. He sat there beside her and looked out at the pines and the outline of Mount Battie beyond them. If you hiked to the top, you had an astonishing view of Penobscot Bay and its islands and peninsulas and lighthouses. When he was seventeen, he’d made his first visit to see Liz in the winter, and they’d hiked up there with a sleeping bag and a bottle of wine pilfered from her father’s boat and made love in the snow, her breath fogging the air above him, snowflakes in her hair. Neither of them had liked the wine, so she’d poured it out in the snow in the shape of a heart, but by then the storm was picking up and the islands were lost to fog and soon the red wine was covered by a blanket of white.

  It remained one of the most vivid memories of his youth. There was only one image that floated to the surface more readily, and that one was far less welcome, though still marked by a crimson stain.

  “He’s not your grandfather,” Liz said.

  “What?”

  “You’re lumping them together. Your grandfather trusted Nate Burke and liked Mathias, and you hated your grandfather, and now—”

  “My grandfather killed my mother, Liz. It’s not a matter of personal dislike. He killed her and got away with it.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes,” he said, and looked away. He was sure of it. He’d just never proven it.

  “The mess today wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t at the Harpoon,” she said. “If you’d seen Mathias anywhere other than in that bar, you wouldn’t have been so damn dumb.”

  He agreed, but somehow he couldn’t imagine the encounter taking place anywhere else. It was as if Mathias had known he was in town, had gone to the most vulnerable ground, and waited.

  She leaned forward and her hair fell across her face like a shield to keep him from seeing her eyes. “The evidence isn’t there, Rob. In either case.”

  He didn’t have a rebuttal. Maybe he was blending the two. He was definitely blending some things; this afternoon, he had not only failed to reverse the family legacy in Port Hope but embraced it. He’d gone into the Harpoon with his blood up, spoiling for a fight. Meanwhile, Mathias had kept his cool. Played peacemaker, even.

  “Roxanne is keeping me out of Maine,” he said.

  “I don’t blame her.”

  “But I’ll be in Boston. Boston’s not that far from you.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she said, but she occupied herself with scraping paint off her jeans with a thumbnail.

  “You’d still have to make the trip, though,” he said.

  She nodded without comment.

  “So it’s not far,” he continued, “but it’s still too far?”

  “Do you want me to make the trip?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Then I’ll make the trip.” She still wasn’t looking at him.

  “That’s exactly the enthusiasm I was hoping for,” he said.

  She looked at him finally, and there was something so sad in her eyes that he had to will himself not to turn away.

  “Do you remember what you told me back at Hammel when I said I wasn’t leaving Maine? You said that people returned to their little hometowns for one of only two reasons—family or failure.”

  “Come on, Liz, I was in college!”

  “So what reasons do you see for people returning to their little hometowns now?”

  He spread his hands in exasperation. “Work, relationships, opportunity, weather, beauty, family, cost of living, I don’t know. Any combination of those. They’re countless.”

  Her eyes searched his. “You know what you never say? That it’s the right place for someone, plain and simple. That the person feels like they belong there.”

  “Wouldn’t that fall into one of the combinations I just mentioned? Why in the hell are you bringing up some conversation we had when we were kids? Did you hear me ask you to move? I never came close to asking that, and I wouldn’t. I’ll be only four hours away. I’m asking if you even want to try, that’s all.”

  “That’s not my point,” she said. “I was just thinking…back then, I heard what you said about needing to leave Maine, and I thought, He doesn’t understand me.”

  “Fair enough. I didn’t. I’m trying to now.”

  She put her hand on his leg then, but the touch wasn’t the welcoming sensation he’d wanted. It felt more like a farewell.

  “I was wrong back then,” she said. “Self-absorbed. I heard what you said, and I thought you didn’t understand me. What I left out was you. I left out the possibility that you understood yourself very well.”

  “What does that mean, Liz?”

  “This place isn’t good for you,” she said. “I think you’ve known that for a long time.”

  He was trying to form an objection when his phone rang. It was Roxanne Donovan.

  “Shit. This won’t be good.”

  “Take it,” Liz said, and she removed her hand from his leg.

  He stood up and walked into the yard and answered. He was expecting to catch hell, to hear that knife-edged voice that Roxanne was capable of producing when provoked, but instead she was calm and clipped.

  “Sounds like you had a bad day, Barrett.”

  “Yes.”

  “In my experience, bad days are often the product of bad decisions. Let’s see if my theory holds up. Tell me what happened.”

  He told her, and she didn’t interrupt, and when he was done, the expected tirade still didn’t come. Instead she simply told him to return to Boston immediately and produce a written account of the incident with Mathias Burke.

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake, and it won’t happen again.”

  “Not to worry,” she said. “It’s actually done you some good.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’ve been promoted.”

  He stood staring at the shadowed slope of Mount Battie and trying to comprehend what she’d just said.

  “Can you explain that?”

  “You’re the boss of Butte.”

  The FBI’s Butte field office had closed in the 1980s, but nevertheless a Hoover-era joke lingered in the Bureau that if you pissed off the director, you were sent to Butte.

  “Bad joke, Roxanne,” he said.

  “Wish it were one. You have been promoted and reassigned to the Bozeman, Montana, field office. I’m told that Washington feels the new SAC out there could use some help getting his feet under him. Apparently, and I quote, ‘Rob Barrett’s recent expertise with rural task forces makes him an asset.’”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. Because I had an exchange of words with some idiot in a bar, I’m being sent to Bozeman?”

  In his peripheral vision, he saw Liz rise and stare.

  “It wasn’t
a product of that exchange, no matter how ill-advised that was,” Roxanne said. “I caught wind of it this morning, well before you ignored my instructions and showed up in Maine.” She paused, and then her voice softened. “For whatever it’s worth, I will tell you that my protest was completely disregarded. I shouldn’t share that with you, but I will.”

  “Bozeman,” he said, numb. He remembered her comment on the day of the pond search—the Bureau didn’t often fire agents, they just buried them.

  “With any luck, it will be temporary. Go out there, work hard, keep your head down, and let time do what time does.”

  “What is it that time does, Roxanne?”

  “Heals all wounds, is what they say. And what they say is bullshit, I know. But what time really does do? It lets things cool off. Once the heat dies down on you here, I’ll get you back.”

  He hung up in a daze, pocketed the phone, and turned back to Liz. She was standing on the bottom step of the porch, as if she’d started toward him but then stopped.

  “That wasn’t some kind of a joke or a threat?” she said. “It was real? Bozeman?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Bozeman. It was real.”

  Part Two

  Storytellers

  Now every day is numbered

  And so are the words.

  —Matthew Ryan,

  “Hustle Up Starlings”

  20

  He’d been in Montana for six months when Kimberly Crepeaux was released from the Knox County jail without much fanfare. Liz wrote an article noting the release and recapping her role in the murder stories, but by then police and public opinion had been settled: samples of blood taken from the bed of Jeffrey Girard’s truck matched Jackie Pelletier’s and Ian Kelly’s DNA. Kimberly was viewed as a liar, not a murderer, and the only national attention the case got had one theme: Rob Barrett. He didn’t read the stories. The headlines were enough.

  False Confession Haunts Port Hope Residents